Age, Marriage Equality, and Knowing Gay People

Some interesting data from Andrew Gelman and Daniel Lee. First the familiar finding that support for marriage equality is strongly correlated with being young:

Second, who tells pollsters that they know someone who’s gay:

Now one assumes that America’s senior citizens are actually mistaken about this and have, in fact, been acquainted with a gay person or two over the course of their lives. But they probably didn’t realize it.

At any rate, there are interesting age-related patterns in both questions but they look to be very different patterns. The under-30 cohort’s strong support for marriage equality, in particular, doesn’t seem to stem from any notably greater familiarity with gay individuals.